Dual boot problems

[Guest]

I had XP Pro on Partition 1, Media Center on Partiton 2 and Vista RC2 on
Partition 3.

XP and Vista worked fine. Then I wanted to check something on Media Center
and got error after error including blue screens. Spent hours with Dell
Support. At one point they even changed the processor

Finally I wiped everything and clean installed XP , then Vista.

XP, on the partition NEXT to Vista, went all to hell just like Media Center,
also next to Vista partition, had been. But Vista ran great.

Back to Square1. I'm just running XP Pro. It's flying, but I'd like to dual
boot.

But has anyone else had these dual boot problems? Any advice?

How about VirtualPC? Is 1G RAM enuff?

 

[Guest]

I'm afraid that I'm pretty much a bucket of cold water on this one. If you
want Vista and Windows XP to co-exist as multi-boot partners on the same
system you really need to use Vista Ultimate (RTM, NOT RC2 anything) with
BitLocker enabled and hiding Vista from WinXP BEFORE you ever reboot into
WinXP, or you need to use a third party boot manager to hide Vista from
WinXP. Otherwise, WinXP will immediately set about trashing System Restore
points and Shadow Copy data on the Vista partition during its first session.

Frankly, multi-booting Windows operating systems these days just seems like
a waste for almost all purposes. (YMMV) I'd definitely go with virtual
machines, either through one of the Microsoft offerings (VPC or Virtual
Server) or through VMWare. Run Vista as the host and WinXP under a Virtual
Machine. Or don't run WinXP at all, if you can help it. Or, best yet, just
put each OS on its own physical system.

All that being said, I can't imagine what is happening on your system. I've
had plenty of experience trying to multi-boot Vista with operating systems
before I decided that it wasn't worth the effort. (It can be done, but, to
me, it isn't worth the effort.) I NEVER saw Vista cause problems within
another co-existing operating system. I mean, if you do something untoward
with the boot manager you might make another OS unbootable, but I never saw
Vista mess up the contents of another operating system's partition. Windows
XP is, however, not nearly so well-behaved. It savages anything that looks
like a restore point that it "thinks" is corrupted.

I would be very interesting in knowing whether or not it was really Vista
that caused this issue with your WinXP installations. Can't see how it could
be the case, but I'm willing to learn.

I hope someone else may have more useful information for you.

 

[Bill Condie]

Thanks for the feedback.

<<Or, best yet, just put each OS on its own physical system.

You mean a second HD?

I see many sites on how to dual boot successfully, but I think I'll take
your advice and forget it.

 

[Guest]

You're welcome, for what my input was worth. As I said, I am sorry to throw
cold water, but I think dual booting Vista with WinXP is a real PIA. If you
have a definite reason for needing both operating systems, and you need both
of them to boot from the same system, then dual booting MIGHT be worth the
hassle. I would imagine that most people would be dual booting Vista with
WinXP so that they could continue to use WinXP as their main OS while
examining Vista to see how it behaves. But if you're not careful about
protecting the Vista partiton from WinXP's overzealous System Restore
behavior, then you won't be seeing Vista in its normal state. You'll be
seeing a crippled Vista without its Previous Version features, and so on.

That's why I suggested separate systems. (I meant totally separate
computers, not separate hard drives, which would do nothing at all to protect
Vista from WinXP.) Another possibility would be using either Vista or WinXP
as the host operating system, installing a virtual machine environment
(VMWare, VPC, etc.) and installing the other OS on a virtual machine. I'm
thinking that, with these operating systems, 1 gigabyte is a little slim on
memory. I do some VPC and Virtual Server stuff with a fast notebook with two
60 gigabyte hard drives and 2 gigs of memory, and I wouldn't want to be using
anything slower. If you try this put the test OS on the virtual machine. It's
going to be the slow one. Also be prepared for a bit of a learning curve with
respect to dealing with virtual machines, if you haven't done that before. If
you're just looking at a test OS in isolation, then there's not much to do
besides install it and use it on the VM. If you're trying to do anything like
networking, then there can be a little more to it.

There are a lot of sites out there with information on dual booting. Unless
you're looking at a site that has been updated intelligently to cover the
hassles between WinXP and Vista then you're getting just enough information
to get you into trouble. As I said, Vista is pretty well-behaved with respect
to being nice to other operating systems when it gets installed. But WinXP
does the nasty to Vista's restore points and shadow copy data. I found this
out the hard way in the early days. And there still seem to be quite a few
folks who are unaware of this. For better or for worse, the System Restore
functionality in Vista has been extended to include the ability to keep
previous versions of data files available for a while -- kind of like an
extended Recycle Bin. It's an important feature of Vista and should be seen
working properly rather than crippled when you're testing the OS.

Lots of subtle and not-so-subtle differences in the OS that require, I
think, an adjustment in thinking if one is to make the best -- and safest --
use of them.

 

[Guest]

Bill,

Your Post was simply incredible, filled with not only wisdom, filled with
experiences learned the difficult method, and oh how accurate! been there
tried that myself. Unfortunately, too many others remain for knowing what
succinctly you described.


Again, thank you for your Post,
--
Life is Wonderful while using Vista solo !

Posting & Painting
"Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and
exposing them to the critic."

(Ambrose Bierce)

 

[Guest]

jimmuh,

Your Post was simply incredible, filled with not only wisdom, filled with
experiences learned the difficult method, and oh how accurate! been there
tried that myself. Unfortunately, too many others remain for knowing what you
succinctly described.

PS: Moments earlier intended Posting you, by accident wrongly Posted to a
follow-up Post.

Again, thank you for you informative wisdom filled Post,
--
Life is Wonderful while using Vista solo !

Posting & Painting
"Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and
exposing them to the critic."

(Ambrose Bierce)

 

[Guest]

jimmuh,

In my view, you illuminated a situation with knowledge by throwing *hot*
water into a much not needed state of affairs practiced by many folks lacking
full understanding for what they desired attempting.
--
Life is Wonderful while using Vista solo !

Posting & Painting
"Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and
exposing them to the critic."

(Ambrose Bierce)

 

[Guest]

Agree that Jim...'s post was informative, but my experiences have been
different.

My two test boxes for Vista was one host box with XP x64 and one with X86.
Staying away from use of the restore/backup systems in Vista, I successfully
ran dual boots with XP x64 and all Vistas on the XP host, and all Vistas on
the XP x64 box without any problems whatsoever. Both Win explorers showed
both partitions and allowed use of spyware programs on the host which would
scan the XP partitions and the Vista ones.

As far as using VM's, have used both VPC and vmware, and trying Vista as a
Guest works poorly because of the lack of signficant amounts of RAM available
for Vista. However, placing XP x86 on as guest runs perfectly. My experience
showed poorly regarding speed with VPC 2007, but Vmware without a lot of
programs in XP x86 as guest ran like a virgin sheep.

 

[Guest]

Yes, Vista will mostly behave itself properly co-existing with WinXP in a
multi-boot system -- even without the types of protection I outlined. But I
think that most "systems people" (and maybe most people in general) are best
served by learning about a new OS by seeing it fully functional. Vista left
unprotected and multi-booted with WinXP is not fully functional. As a matter
of fact there are some reports that indicate that running Vista in such a
situation without disabling System Restore and the Volume Shadow Copy service
can lead to some pretty weird behaviors. I know nothing about that, however,
because the mere fact that System Restore was interfered with was enough to
put me off of the multi-boot arrangement. My express purpose was to learn
about Vista, and I wanted to do that without interference.

To tell you the truth, I am a little underwhelmed by System Restore, and
particularly by the expansion of its duties in Vista. I have security /
privacy concerns about the way the Volume Shadow Copy service does its thing,
and I imagine that I'll have to deal with that over the months to come. That,
in addition to curiosity, is why I have to learn how it works on a single
boot system.

 

[CZ]

I had XP Pro on Partition 1, Media Center on Partition 2 and Vista RC2 on
Partition 3.

XP and Vista worked fine. Then I wanted to check something on Media Center
and got error after error including blue screens. Spent hours with Dell
Support. At one point they even changed the processor

Finally I wiped everything and clean installed XP , then Vista.

XP, on the partition NEXT to Vista, went all to hell just like Media Center,
also next to Vista partition, had been. But Vista ran great.

Back to Square1. I'm just running XP Pro. It's flying, but I'd like to dual
boot.

But has anyone else had these dual boot problems? Any advice?

Bill:

IMO, your problem is not necessarily the dual boot setup.
What you might do is leave XP as a clean install, install Vista as a clean
install, then add a program in one op system and test, then repeat. I
assume that you are treating each op system as anonymous: meaning, that if
you want the same program in both op systems, then you are installing it
separately in both op systems. What defragging app are you using?

On this Dell Dimension 9100, I use Vista's dual boot mgr to boot between two
copies of Vista RTM, XP Home, XP Pro, and two copies of Win2k3 server.
Works great.

 

[Bill Condie]

The really weird thing is that Vista ran its best ever on my last install,
while XP was a disaster!

Strangely, I'm not finding much on the dual-boot problems. Many of the sites
seem like an ad for True Image.

I just tried Virtual PC2003. Kept getting the error it couldn't find files
on my home-made DVD.

So, looks like I'll wait for the MS Actionpack subscription to arrive and
then run XP on VPC. I do need XP for a coupla things, like CuteFTP can't get
into my web host. A security thing that tech support couldn't help with last
time we spoke. It also doesn't like my old-ish Quark4. And PM8 doesn't like
Vista at all

 

[Bill Condie]

Would you believe Dell is ready to replace my "Vista-Ready" machine?

One tech was marvellous. He reduced the PageFile to HALF the physical RAM
and assured me all my problems would be gone!

 

[Bill Condie]

It is bizarre, Jack.

I was doing fine on a TRIPLE boot until I started playing around with Media
Center which is ahead of Vista on some stuff.

Any ideas on what's going on with me? Dell will be calling today to see if
I've had any Blue Screens since Thursday. Should I take a new machine, or
tell 'em it was just a Vista problem?

 

[Bill Condie]

They were all clean installs, and programs were separate installs on each
OS. No shared programs, but a shared data partition.

Defrag on XP was Windows OneStep, which is just like a regular Windows
defrag I'm sure

At this point I'm wondering again if I have a machine problem . . .

 

[Bill Condie]

Meanwhile I'm reading this on another Vista NG. Quite confusing . . .

Please search this ng and the vista.general ng on "volsnap.sys." This has
been elaborated on ad nauseum. The reason you haven't run into this before
is that Windows OS's prior to XP did not have VSS. MS enhanced VSS in Vista
and the XP volsnap.sys (VSS driver) is incompatible with Vista VSS. It
removes incompatible VSS files upon booting into XP. Volsnap.sys enumerates
all VSS files systemwide so when it enumerates the ones on the Vista volume
it deletes them. As I said, please do the search. The explanations are
pretty detailed. This is not a Vista bug because it is not caused by Vista.
It is an incompatibility between Vista and XP VSS. MS is well aware of this
issue and has decided not to fix it because it would require an extensive
rewrite to XP and the percentage of the user base who dual boot is minuscle.

 

[Guest]

Hi, Bill.

As I said, this is well-documented. A lot of people have been, and are going
to be, burned by this. There are ways around it, but you do have to be
precise in the way you go about setting up WinXP and Vista in a multi-boot
system.

In the meantime, I think you should definitely be examining the hardware. As
I've also said, I know of no means by which Vista could sabotage a WinXP
installation by any means other than Vista's boot manager preventing the
WinXP from launching. I am, of course, excluding performing some types of
operations on one operating system's partition from within an operating
system on another partition.

Anyway, given the history you describe it's certainly possible that you have
some type of hardware issue. Why Vista would not be affected adversely while
WinXP is would tend to point, perhaps, more to a device driver issue more
than a hardware issue. We all know that WinXP is critically sensitive to
hardware and driver issues. I would expect the same of Vista, though I
haven't seen much temperamental behavior from it as of yet. If Vista doesn't
blue screen on the same hardware that WinXP does blue screen on, one has to
be thinking along the lines of Vista maybe having a better driver for some
device than does WinXP.

I should have paid more attention to this aspect of your first post than I
did. I was wanting to warn you about the multi-boot issues and got
sidetracked. If you're on a limited schedule with respect to being able to
return the system to Dell you really need to be sure that your hardware is
okay. Again, Dell support may (or may not) give you some grief about
multi-booting. They'll certainly be happiest and most cooperatiive about
supporting the system on the OS with which it was shipped. I think you should
take whatever path will most quickly give you some assurance that your
hardware is okay.

Unfortunately, one of the things I've noticed about Dell diagnostics (and,
to be fair, those from other OEMs) is that they often don't register a
hardware failure that isn't frank. And, after all, who needs help deciding
his HD is dead if the danged thing doesn't spin? It can be especially hard to
diagnose RAM issues.

What were the blue screen messages? Were they the same in both WinXP
installations? Were they consistent, or did they vary?

 

[Guest]

As a further note, I just wanted to stipulate that there are many software
packages which behave like "drivers" -- any kind of system monitoring
software like AV or firewall software may install drivers and will install
services that could cause blue screens on one OS and not on another on a
given set of hardware.

 

[Bill Condie]

The first blue screens were this:
Driver_IRQL_not_less_or_equal

http://www.billcondie.com/imgs/blue1.jpg

The latest was different:

http://www.billcondie.com/imgs/blue2.jpg

 

[nofumble]

"think the user who dual boot is minuscle huh?" I don't think so.
Look at the HDD sales lately? All the 500G internal HDD are sold out
and the price jumped $20 in last 2 weeks.



I have been enjoying Vista on a newly build computer for few weeks.
Mostly for Web surfing, watching DVD. Life was good. Until my daughter
needs to do homework using XP application softwares that I cannot load
on a Vista system. (Office 2003 duh, 3D Home and Landscape)

OK. So I bought a seperate HDD, hooked it in as HDD#2 and install XP
on this new HDD. Work fine of course except now everytime I turned on
the machine, XP would boot up automatically. Where is my Vista now?

Then I went into the BIOS trying to disable one drive. Unlike older
system, it does not allow me to disable a drive. Mine is an Intel
DG965SS board.

Next, I used the Vista DVD to boot, then repaired the Vista in HDD#1.
Now the Vista would boot everytime, but how I can get the XP to boot
when I need it?

Then I tried to switch the HDD#1 cable with HDD#2 so the drive with XP
would boot first. Guesswhat I got the NTLDS boot error. Neither XP nor
Vista came up.

Final solution as I could come up: Connect only one HDD and boot up
whatever OS loaded in that drive. So everytime I need to switch OS, I
have to switch the SATA cable to the other HDD.

So far so good. I wonder how long that SATA connector will last. I
hope when the cable or the HDD breaks, I can send the bill to Mr.
Bill Gates.

I saw in microsoft vista FAQ site on some instruction how to set up
dual boot. It sounds complicated. I will check into it in a few days.

But this is sad, very sad that Microsoft cannot solve this type of
user problem. Especially when their newly OS Vista is not compatible
with their own XP application softwares such as Office 2003, McAfee
antivirus, etc. I can see how many customer will be frustrated after
paying for the Vista tomorrow, then find out they cannot get old
software applications to load in Vista.

They ought to change the law to allow customer to return the software
if it doesn't work unless there is a warning label: UNLIKELY TO WORK
WITH YOUR OLD XP APPLICIATIONS.

 

[Max]

Office 2003 works fine in Vista.
McAfee Antivirus does not come from Microsoft.

http://www.vistabootpro.org/